1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed generally to wireless communication and, more particularly, to a system and method for providing a user indication of expected communication speed in a wireless communication device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless communication in its early form provided simple two-way voice communication in the form of cellular telephones. Since those early days, wireless communication has expanded greatly to include a great number of applications. In addition to conventional voice communication, modern wireless devices include email, text messaging, music, web surfing, and even video downloads and video streaming. To accommodate the higher bandwidth requirements of such applications, new generations of wireless technology have evolved. Early technologies, such as advance mobile phone service (AMPS), were replaced with more advanced technologies such as global system for mobile communication (GSM).
New technologies, generally categorized as third generation (3G) networks, have evolved to accommodate the wide bandwidth applications.
It is widely known that wireless devices have an indicator that shows the signal strength of the connection between the wireless device and the network. In a typical implementation, the wireless device may display signal strength as a number of “bars” shown on the display. In this application, one bar may indicate a low signal strength, while four or five bars indicates a high signal strength. With older technologies such as GSM, the number of bars may also provide an indication to the user of the expected communication speed between the wireless device and the wireless network. For example, one bar in a GSM system would indicate a low signal strength and relatively low download speeds. Similarly, five bars in a GSM wireless system would indicate a high signal strength and a relatively high download speed. Thus, the expectation by the user is that a good signal strength will result in a high data rate, while a low signal strength may result in a low data rate.
Unfortunately, with newer technologies, the signal strength does not necessarily relate to the expected speed of downloads or uploads. That is, a high signal strength (e.g., five bars) may not result in high speed communication between the network and the wireless device while a low signal strength (e.g., one bar) does not necessarily mean that the user will not be provided with a high speed connection between the mobile device and the wireless network.
Therefore, it can be appreciated that there is a significant need for a system and method to provider the user with an indication of an expected communication speed between the user's wireless device and the wireless network.